By way of a quick recap, somewhere in excess of 60 per cent of the £10bn a year spent on digital advertising in the UK goes to Facebook and Google. The overall market is growing fast, but most of the new money (80 per cent plus) is going to the Duopoly.

Google makes most its money out of search (£5bn plus a year in the UK) and Facebook makes its revenue from display advertising. Both are outgunning journalism companies because they offer highly targeted ads at a fraction of the cost that someone who has to employ journalists can.

It had been thought that Buzzfeed’s native advertising model made it more resilient. By selling adverts which are embedded in editorial (albeit flagged up as sponsored) Buzzfeed should have been insulated from the pressure on display advertising.

Advertising has subsidised journalism for centuries. If we are heading to a future where even huge brands like Buzzfeed can’t afford to employ journalists based on advertising revenue then readers will be the losers.

One of the attendees told of a friend who wanted to cover the event for a national newspaper website, but was told by his editor that there were no hits in Grenfell Tower stories any more. To use modern parlance, it is no longer ‘trending’.

Facebook and Google would be very much less interesting places for their users to spend time without professionally-produced journalism on the platforms.

The redundancies at Archant and Buzzfeed are a consequence of the pressure on advertising caused by the domination and success of these two platforms. The anecdote about the Grenfell event illustrates the extent to which stories are going uncovered online unless they can attract stupendous amounts of traffic for a minimum amount of effort.

Mail Online appears to be prospering perhaps because as the largest newspaper website in the world it has the scale required to compete with the Duopoly. But many other publishers are struggling.

I would argue it is in the best interests of the Duopoly and of us all to urgently find ways to share more of the revenue they make from content with the originators, and to incentivise quality journalism on a diverse array of subjects.